Oil and sand on canvas; 160 by 100cm.

Italian painter and stage designer. His interest in art was encouraged by his father, the art historian Umberto Gnoli, and his mother, the painter and ceramicist Annie de Garon, but his only training consisted of lessons in drawing and printmaking from the Italian painter and printmaker Carlo Alberto Petrucci (b 1881). After holding his first one-man exhibition in 1950, he studied stage design briefly in 1952 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome; he enjoyed immediate success in this field, for example designing a production of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It for the Old Vic Theatre in London in 1955. He then began to live part-time in New York, where he began to work as an illustrator for magazines such as Sports Illustrated. During this period he drew inspiration from earlier art, especially from master printers such as Jacques Callot and Hogarth, from whom he derived his taste for compositions enlivened by large numbers of figures stylized to the point of caricature. In other works he emphasized the patterns of textiles or walls, boldly succumbing to the seduction of manual dexterity and fantasy in a style that was completely out of step with the prevailing trends of the 1950s.

Tags:   domenico gnoli gnoli painter 20th century contemporary italian 1966 1960s coat sotheby's modern realism pop art

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Ink on paper collage mounted on polished stainless steel; 229.9 x 121.6 cm.

Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera. His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk.

From 1947 until 1958, Pistoletto worked in his father’s restoration workshop in Turin. In the 1950s, he started painting figurative works and self-portraits. In 1959, he participated in the Biennale di San Marino. In the following year, he had his first solo exhibition in the Galleria Galatea in Turin. In the beginning of the 1960s, Pistoletto started painting figurative works and self-portraits which he painted on a monochrome, metallic background. Later on, he combined painting with photography using collage techniques on reflective backgrounds. In doing so, he sometimes used concave or convex distorting mirrors, which made the observer appear too large or too small in comparison with the realistic-looking painted figures. Eventually, he switched over to printing photorealistic scenes on steel plates polished to a high finish. He did that using the screen-printing method which made the observer almost completely melt in with what was depicted. In the mid-1960s, gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend brought him into contact with an international audience.

In 1965/1966, he produced the series of works Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), which belongs to Pistoletto’s early sculptural works. In 1966, Pistoletto had his first solo exhibition in the USA, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 1967, his work was awarded first prize in the Biennale de São Paolo. In the same year, Pistoletto started focusing on performance, video art and theatre. He founded an action art group, called "Zoo Group", which gave several performances between 1968 and 1970. These took place in the studio, public buildings or on the streets of Turin or other large cities. As was already the case with Pistoletto’s 2-dimensional and sculptural works, the aim was to display the unity of art and everyday life.

Tags:   michelangelo pistoletto pistoletto painter 20th century contemporary italian 1973 1970s man shooting christie's pop art modern realism arte povera

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Enamel on canvas; 50 x 70 cm.

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani, Italy. She completed her classical studies in high school, and in 1943 she trained privately for an art diploma. She continued her art training at the Accademia di Belle Arti of both Palermo and Florence. In 1946 she moved to Rome with the painter Antonio Sanfilippo, who she married a few years later. Accardi quickly became part of the inner circle of the Art Club and was a frequent visitor to Consagra’s studio. There she met such artists as Attardi, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli, and Turcato, with whom she signed the manifesto of the Forma 1 group in 1947. She took part in many group shows in Italy and abroad; her first solo exhibition was in 1950 at the Galleria Numero in Florence. During the 1950s Accardi developed a reductivist visual language that became more and more abstract. She focused on signs and limited her palette to black and white, thus linking herself visually to the major artists of the Art Informel movement. Between 1954 and 1959, Michel Tapiè, an art critic and promoter of the movement, invited her to take part in several exhibitions that he organized in Italy and abroad.

In the 1960s Accardi joined the Continuità group; she began to reintegrate color into her work, making references to metropolitan culture and optical illusion. She continued to explore new possibilities by experimenting with diverse media, eventually beginning to paint on plastic transparent supports, which emphasised the luminous surface of the painting. She took part in the Venice Biennale several times, appearing first in 1964 and again in 1976 and 1978.

In the 1980s Accardi returned to canvas, and her visual language changed again as she shifted her focus to the use of signs and chromatic juxtapositions. She showed again at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and took part in the most important retrospectives of twentieth-century Italian Art. Among these was The Italian Metamorphosis 1943–1968, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1994. She was nominated a member of the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1996, and the following year she became part of the Venice Biennale Commission as an advisor. Her work is part of many important collections, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Castello di Rivoli (Turin), the Gallerie Civiche of Modena and Bologna, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and the Museo Civico in Turin. The artist currently lives and works in Rome.

Tags:   carla accardi accardi painter 20th century contemporary female 1956 1950s in fields christie's abstract abstract expressionism

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Acrylic on cellotex.

Alberto Burri was an Italian abstract painter and sculptor. Città di Castello has memorialized him with a large permanent museum of his works. He earned a medical degree in 1940 from the University of Perugia and was a military physician during World War II. After his unit was captured in North Africa, he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas in 1944, where he began to paint. After his release in 1946, Burri moved to Rome; his first solo show was at the Galleria La Margherita in 1947.

Burri soon turned to abstraction and unorthodox materials, making collages with pumice, tar, and burlap, and started a series of canvases that bulged into the 3rd dimension. His work is related to European Tachisme, American Abstract expressionism, and Lyrical Abstraction. In the mid-1950s, Burri began producing charred wood and burlap works, then welded iron sheets. In the early 1960s he was burning plastic, and in the early 1970s started his "cracked" paintings, or cretti. He created a series of works in the industrial material, Cellotex, from 1979 through the 1990s.

In the 1980s, Burri created a form of land art project on the town of Gibellina in Sicily. The town was abandoned following an earthquake in 1968, with the inhabitants being rehoused in a newly built town 18 km away. Burri covered most of the old town, an area roughly 300 metres by 400 metres, with white concrete. He called this the Grande Cretto.

Burri was awarded the Italian Order of Merit in 1994.

Tags:   alberto burri burri painter 20th century contemporary 1982 1980s sextant 2 public collection abstract abstract expressionism

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Painted tissue paper on stainless steel, in two parts; 103.4 x 139.8 cm.

Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera. His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk.

From 1947 until 1958, Pistoletto worked in his father’s restoration workshop in Turin. In the 1950s, he started painting figurative works and self-portraits. In 1959, he participated in the Biennale di San Marino. In the following year, he had his first solo exhibition in the Galleria Galatea in Turin. In the beginning of the 1960s, Pistoletto started painting figurative works and self-portraits which he painted on a monochrome, metallic background. Later on, he combined painting with photography using collage techniques on reflective backgrounds. In doing so, he sometimes used concave or convex distorting mirrors, which made the observer appear too large or too small in comparison with the realistic-looking painted figures. Eventually, he switched over to printing photorealistic scenes on steel plates polished to a high finish. He did that using the screen-printing method which made the observer almost completely melt in with what was depicted. In the mid-1960s, gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend brought him into contact with an international audience.

In 1965/1966, he produced the series of works Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), which belongs to Pistoletto’s early sculptural works. In 1966, Pistoletto had his first solo exhibition in the USA, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 1967, his work was awarded first prize in the Biennale de São Paolo. In the same year, Pistoletto started focusing on performance, video art and theatre. He founded an action art group, called "Zoo Group", which gave several performances between 1968 and 1970. These took place in the studio, public buildings or on the streets of Turin or other large cities. As was already the case with Pistoletto’s 2-dimensional and sculptural works, the aim was to display the unity of art and everyday life.

Tags:   michelangelo pistoletto pistoletto painter 20th century contemporary italian 1962 1960s man reading portrait arte povera modern realism

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